1. Field of the Disclosure
The present disclosure relates to web services and, in particular, to a web services broker.
2. Description of the Related Art
One element for the next generation of e-business systems is collaboration. Presently, collaboration is narrowly addressed by a multitude of e-business automation applications: business-to-customer (B2C) or customer-to-customer (C2C) interaction, business-to-business (B2B) integration, business logic componentization, business process orchestration, legacy systems integration, etc. All of these applications have something in common in that they collaborate electronically to create an infrastructure for certain business to take place. However, a limitation of this is the lack of common global framework (one that everybody agrees to use) under which all those distributed applications (services) can interoperate and discover each other. This limitation causes a lot of investment and effort to go into creation of appropriate purpose-oriented collaboration solutions, which usually are closely coupled, platform/technology/vendor/implementation/language-dependent, difficult to reuse in a uniform way, may not be Internet ready, etc. Creating a new collaboration point usually increases overall system complexity, reduces reliability and requires even more resources for maintaining and extending such systems.